Book Review

On
July 6, 2011, Hawai‘i Governor Neil Abercrombie signed Senate
Bill 1520 into law, recognizing Native Hawaiians, or Kanaka Maoli, as
the state's only indigenous population. Hailed by supporters as a historic step
toward enfranchising a people whose self-determination was usurped when the
United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai‘i's
monarchical government in 1893 and annexed the islands five years later, the
legislation tasks a commission with compiling a roll of Hawaiians qualifying to
participate in forming a semi-autonomous government, should Congress one day
recognize their native status at the federal level. For indigenous politics
professor Noenoe Silva, however, political enfranchisement first requires
reinserting accounts of native resistance into historical narratives about
events preceding annexation, which frequently exclude Hawaiian voices in order
to whitewash colonial subjugation as something passively accepted and
inevitable. It is precisely these kinds of categorical myths that Silva
explodes in Aloha Betrayed, a sizzling and sophisticated work of
anti-colonial scholarship.

Though
focused on aboriginal concerns, Silva's project is heavily influenced by the
conception of power put forward by the French philosopher Michel Foucault,
whereby power relations are studied at the everyday, in addition to
institutional, level, as fluid mechanisms that structure individual experience.
Theorists working in the Foucauldian tradition upon whom Silva draws, like
Lawrence Levine and Michel de Certeau, located colonial resistance within
processes of assimilation, arguing that the colonized refashioned the
suppressive customs, norms, and protocols imposed by the colonizer into tools
for deflecting acculturation and opening space for the solidification of
sovereign identity. For example, a primary means of cultural erasure in
missionary Hawai‘i involved the valorization of writing
over speech, since native histories and cosmologies were orally transmitted
from one generation to the next, through chants, stories, and songs. Interrupting
oral traditions with the power of the pen was, thus, designed to fracture
indigenous ways of ordering space and time, making identity formation and
social communication impossible, while buttressing missionary attempts to
"civilize" a people that lacked the literacy skills necessary for learning
scripture. In just a few decades, though, Kanaka Maoli became one of the
most literate populations in the world, eventually employing their newfound
textual prowess to publish Hawaiian language newspapers that challenged
linguicidal initiatives by their very existence and circulation.

Hawaiian
language papers are among the most important documents analyzed in Aloha
Betrayed, serving as validation of indigenous epistemologies that
contravene Western representations of the colonial encounter. During the early
1860s, according to Silva, Hawaiians created the kingdom's first paper free of Puritan control, Ka Hoku o ka
Pakipika, which ran scathing editorials about the abuses of missionary
planters alongside Hawaiian moʻolelo, or communal legends. Unfortunately, the paper only lasted
for three years (1861-1863), but it nonetheless became the model for ensuing
anti-hegemonic presses, including some that lingered into the twentieth
century. Within the pages of Hawaiian language papers, Kanaka Maoli were
able to preserve stories, mele (songs), and hula (dances)
significant to their heritage, permitting the reimagination and articulation of
sovereign nationhood. Ergo, at a time when some Hawaiian rulers, known as aliʻi, were colluding with foreigners to codify
a capitalist class system in the islands, the newspapers allowed the makaʻāinana, or common people, to contest discursive
and psychological domestication, while reclaiming a measure of control over
their political lives.

More
than a decade after the cessation of Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika, its most
celebrated editor, King David Kalākaua, ascended to the throne and, in
turn, fought the onslaught of colonial othering by bringing back public
performance of the hula and ancient legends, which church edict had banned.
Additionally, Kalākaua ordered the printing of the Kumulipo, a
cosmogonic chant that binds the genealogy of reigning royals to the beginning
of the universe. To assert the legitimacy of their rule, monarchs situated
themselves within the sacred genealogies regulating Hawaiians'
self-understanding, both in terms of bloodlines and existential continuity.
Committing the Kumulipo to written form, therefore, functioned not
simply to sanction the ascent of Kalākaua, who was not connected with the
Kamehameha dynasty that had overseen the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi for over sixty years, but also to strengthen the spiritual
core at the heart of Hawaiian nationalism by clarifying the cultural gulf
between Kanaka Maoli and their oppressors, turning the eliminationist
logic of colonizing forces against themselves.

Kalākaua's
vision of cultural revival ultimately succumbed to the threat of an
anti-monarchical militia, culminating in the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 that
transferred authority from the throne to predominantly American and European
elites in the Hawaiian legislature and king's cabinet. Nevertheless, the
national unity fomented under Kalākaua's newspaper management and forged
during his reign was crystallized in the 1897 petitions protesting annexation,
punctuated by 21,269 signatures. Organized by three groups—the Hui Aloha 'Āina for Women, the Hui Aloha 'Āina for Men, and the Hui Kālai'āina—with support from Queen Lili‘uokalani, who had been deposed in 1893 by a group of
foreigners favoring annexation, the petitions appealed to the federalist ideals
of equal justice and popular democracy, contending that Hawaiian condemnation
of annexation rendered such an act antithetical to the stated principles of the
United States government. On December 9, 1897, Senator George Hoar, a
Republican from Massachusetts, read the text of the petitions on the floor of
the United States Senate, after which they were formally accepted by the
chamber.

As
a legislative director and an indigenous scholar, the educational value of the
anti-annexation petitions is inestimable. Too often, the story of annexation is
enunciated from the locus of the colonizer, as if the only struggle surrounding
annexation was the United States' march toward imperial completion. More
problematically, historiographical expositions of the era have, for
generations, relied mainly, if not entirely, on English language sources,
naturalizing the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy as a progressive
achievement, while obfuscating contrasting evidence pregnant with the
possibility that Hawai‘i can be comprehended as a separate
nation coupled with a unique identity. Despite its failure to fully address the
manner in which the legacy of the colonizer may be emancipated by an
acknowledgement of native defiance, Aloha Betrayed is an important
corrective to these historical inaccuracies perpetrated upon the Kanaka
Maoli and an essential volume for critics of indigenous abjection,
particularly those striving to construct spheres for aboriginal populations to
speak for themselves.

Kris Coffield is
an independent scholar and legislative director for the IMUAlliance, a
nonpartisan political action organization devoted to advancing educational and
economic equality. He is the creator of the political theory website
fracturedpolitics.com, and is completing his first book, The Object of
International Relations. He can be contacted at kriscoffield@gmail.com.

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